Focusing on Your Strengths Summary

This video is a ted talk with Shane Lopez. Shane explains that he is a “strength finder” to help
people to be able to identify and nurture their strengths. He explains how as a society we focus way too
much on the negative aspects of our life instead of the positives that we should be focusing on. He even
gives some statistics that back this up. He explains that if someone was given a list of your strengths and
weakness as an individual, 70% of Americans would focus more on the weaknesses that were listed over
all the strengths that were listed. He goes into explaining how we are programed to think this way and
why this is a bad thing. He shows us that from a young age we are programed to focus more on the
negatives through our parents. He then explains a survey done on parents in the U.S. that showed 93%
of parents will focus on the lower grades on report cards rather then the high grades. Ultimately this is a
bad thing to do. Focusing on the negatives are a bad thing because focusing on negative things will
effective us more than focusing on positive things. For explain if you have a bad flight you will be more
inclined to talk about the flight than if the flight was good and no issues happened.

Shane then goes into depth about ways we can find our strengths as individuals. He does this by
explaining three main things he does as a strength’s finder and coach. These three things are developing
a strength mindset, catching people in moments of excellence, and naming and nurturing someone’s
strengths.

Developing a strengths mindset is the first thing he goes over. This is basically having the belief
that each person has strengths and that they can grow their strengths.

Catching people in moments of excellences is the second thing he goes over. This is best
described in an example. The example he gives is when he was out to dinner with a friend, his friend
stopped the waiter and explained to the waiter that he did a great job serving them tonight and he was
very good at his job.

Naming and nurturing someone’s strengthen is the last topic he goes over. This is when
someone has the ability to identify in a person what their strengths are and have the ability to grow on
that specific strengths with them.

Just like the other video that we watched I plan to use this information in my future career. This
is a interesting topic for me because I find myself focusing on my weaknesses way more than focusing
on what I am actually good at. Focusing more on the strengths will help me in my future career and help
me better myself overall.